


Worth The Trip

by FujurPreux



Category: Transformers: Prime
Genre: Epistolary, Gen, POV First Person, Post-Canon, Road Trips, Unexpected Friendship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-07
Updated: 2019-01-07
Packaged: 2019-10-06 05:53:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,924
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17339768
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FujurPreux/pseuds/FujurPreux
Summary: Post-Series.Without warning, Miko has to team up with Knock Out in order to recover a Spark that found its way from the Well of AllSparks to Tokyo. On the way, they share some adventures and discover a lot of things about each other, but the worst part is having to write a report for the higher-ups.





	Worth The Trip

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you very much to [laurus_nobilis](https://archiveofourown.org/users/laurus_nobilis/pseuds/laurus_nobilis) for the beta :D

_ Hey, Jack! _

_ How is it going? I saw those photos you posted, so I guess vacations are going great, huh. Anyways, listen. Read. Whatever. I have a—I wouldn’t call it a problem  _ per se  _ but more like an issue. A tiny tiny issue. Once I explain it, I’m sure you’ll agree with me with how small it is. _

_ I had an assignment with one of the guys last week and I’ve been trying to write my report but the stuck-ups in command keep rejecting it! Can you believe it? I’ve done and re-done it like five times already and they keep saying it’s too long and has too many irrelevant parts. _

_ They’re SO!!! annoying! This never happened with Bulkhead! He was always happy to know all the details. _

_ Point is, would you mind helping me edit the fragged thing so they leave me alone? I have no idea what to cut and they always like your reports. Besides, mine’s not long! Which is good because they gave me two more days for the final-final deadline. _

_ Thank you, Jack! You’re the best!  _

_ See you soon! _

_ Miko! _

 

_-_-_

 

I presented myself for duty at the appointed time at the rendezvous point, a secluded forest-y area hidden by a couple of hills which I reached with my bicycle. Back then, I ignored everything about this mission, but I was nevertheless excited because it interrupted the monotony of that never-ending visit to my mom’s friend in Nagoya. Besides, I was looking forward to seeing an old friend! It had been a while and I’d missed all the Bots! Or so I thought. Soon, it became clear that I didn’t really miss all of them, because the one who came through the spacebridge was definitely not an old friend. It was that red menace known as Knock Out.

“You?” I exclaimed when I saw him, trying to sound and look as disgusted as I felt.

“Funny,” he replied. “I’m pretty sure I made the same face when I was given this assignment.” 

I made a point of checking behind him even if, to my disappointment, the spacebridge closed behind him. “Yeah. So funny. Seriously, though, where’s my real partner?”

“If you mean Bulkhead, he’s busy doing the one thing he does best after breaking things: laying bricks and can’t be interrupted. Furthermore, this job requires both medical expertise and a certain finesse, which, even you would agree, is far from your friend’s strong suit. As for Ratchet… well, it is tempting to hint a lack of finesse here too, but the old mech is actually good at that when he wants to. He’s actually involved in politics now and in too many committees to come here himself.” Knock Out sighed. “The downsides of power. Does that answer your question?”

I kept my arms folded and I glared at him to make it clear he still wasn’t forgiven for having been such a Big Name Decepticon for so long. Then, I replied, mimicking the way he had said it,“Kinda. However, ‘finesse’ is not my strong suit either.”

“Ugh. Don’t I know it,” he murmured.

“Therefore, if that’s what you need, we’d better wait until someone else is available.” 

I turned around and walked away, but he grunted again and made me stop.

“Unfortunately, it has to be you. You’re the one with the supposed local expertise. And I mean local-to-this-island local, not local-to-this-planet local.” He knelt down and projected the hologram of a street. I recognized it immediately. Just like that, he had done it: I was intrigued despite myself—and he was able to tell. “You know this place, don’t you?”

“That’s the Shibuya district in Tokyo,” I said. “Four hours from here, more or less.”

“Good. That’s where the mission awaits. I’d go by myself, but in such a densely populated area, I’m going to need a –  _ human _ – partner.”

I hate it when former Decepticons are right. “Fine,” I said with a grunt. “What’s going on in Tokyo?” 

Knock Out transformed into his vehicle mode and opened the door. “Hop on. I’ll tell you everything on our way. Believe me,  _ Miko _ ,” he continued when he saw me inching my way to the driver’s seat. “I’m as mortified with this arrangement as you are.”

“I sincerely doubt it,  _ Knock Out _ .” But whatever. I sat down. My bike would be safe where I left it, folded under a pile of leaves until I came back for it. 

“Hm. Is it me or did you get bigger?”

“I grew up! That’s what humans do! It’s been years since the last time I saw you. I can drive and everything on my own now. We’ll be fine if people see only me in here.”

“Huh…”

“Hey, you do come with seat belts,” I said and I fastened it. He also had sweet leather seats, but like hell I was going to tell him that.

“Of course I do,” he replied. “I’m not one of those uncivilized barbarians who would ruin a good model out of pettiness, am I?” He locked the door and revved up the engine. “Just listen to this beauty.”

I couldn’t help myself. “You’re an old model now, Knock Out.”

“ _ What?! _ ”

Eyes closed and hands on the back of my head, I leaned against the headrest, feeling plenty of satisfaction. “Time goes on and waits for no one,” I said. “It’s been years, remember? There are hundreds of newer and slickest models out there right now. Now go straight East for two kilometers and you’ll find the highway.”

“I hate you,” he mumbled, but he started to drive.

I grinned, not hating myself at all. Five minutes in and this mission had already started on the right foot.

Twenty minutes later, though, I got tired of playing with the radio and getting nothing good, so I gave up and turned it off to focus on the landscape passing us by.

“About time. Your inability to decide on anything was annoying,” Knock Out said.

I decided to ignore that and ask something more important. “All right. Spill the beans, Knock Out. What’s our mission?” 

“We are to retrieve a Spark that somehow found its way from the Well to the place I showed you.”

I had no idea of what I expected, but it was definitely not that. “A Spark? As in a baby Cybertronian?”

“It’s not—I wouldn’t say—” He grunted. “If that’s how your feeble human mind can comprehend it, whatever. The point is we need to get it back before some other human finds it.”

“I have so many questions,” I said.

“And I believe I have the answers,” Knock Out said and began projecting a video from a screen on his dashboard. “There. Entertain yourself while I drive.”

I rolled my eyes at that, but I began to pay attention. The video began with a couple of Bots I don’t know yet watching a tablet that I did recognize. Raf and I gave Smokescreen and Bumblebee a couple of those filled with movies and cartoons so they could at least finish what we had started before they left. I was in charge of getting the content while the little nerd made the tablets big enough for them. Not sure how he did it and I don’t really care, but I won’t lie and say I didn’t feel proud about those things making the rounds on Cybertron. Anyway, those two sat down on some chairs and they pressed play on the screen. It was kind of difficult to see because of the distance and the angle, but I’m pretty sure they were watching something with magical girls—and they seemed very excited about it.

As they cheered and pumped their fists on the air, a little shiny ball of light,  _ the _ Spark that caused all this trouble, floated behind them and settled down to watch. I didn’t know they could do that, but at first, I didn’t know anything about giant robots from outer space either. Life does have a way to make us learn, doesn’t it?

“They stay there for a while doing nothing, so let’s skip to the interesting part, shall we,” Knock Out said and fast-forwarded the video. He had been right. The two Bots remained there for a long while, shifting in their seats, exchanging looks whenever anything happened in their show, never realizing the Spark was behind them. After a while, when they moved from their seats and the Spark hid behind a corner, Knock Out had the video go back to its normal speed. It took only a few seconds for the Spark to come back out and float all the way to a panel and hovered there, as if considering the buttons.

“Is it supposed to do that?” I asked.

Knock Out let out a long-suffering sigh. “It’s not even supposed to be outside the Well. That one is going to be a big troublemaker.”

I chuckled. “I’d say it already is.”

Back in the video, The Little Spark That Could hit a couple of buttons and opened a spacebridge. On the other side there was the scene of Shibuya that Knock Out had shown me, and the Spark disappeared into it.

“Wow! That’s clever,” I said.

“Yeah, yeah. Whatever,” Knock Out said. “That’s what happened, although we have no idea why.”

“Oh, but I do!” I made a pause for effect before continuing. “Did you see what the other guys were watching? You’ve got yourselves a young magical girl fan. An excursion to Shibuya was the only logical next step!”

“Of course! I don’t know why I didn’t think of that!”

“You know, I can’t tell if you’re being serious or sarcastic right now.”

“Completely serious. As someone who was categorized as yandere every time in all online tests I took, I feel confident saying that I do have some knowledge on the matter.”

“Yandere. Why am I not surprised,” I said.

“Now you. Have you taken those tests? What did you get?”

I scoffed. “I’m not into that kind of thing. Never done one.”

Knock Out gasped. “Really? How can that be? We need to fix it asap! I think I have at least one of them in my database somewhere…”

“Oh, no! I’m not doing it.” 

“Why not?”

“They’re too silly!”

“But that’s the fun of it!”

I must admit that it never crossed my mind to expect this kind of thing from a former Decepticon. Part of me thought that it would be a good idea to nurture this channel of communication to make the mission easier, but the rest of me plain didn’t want to. In the end, I compromised and took the conversation to what I thought would be neutral ground.

“Life must’ve been really boring in the Nemesis, huh.”

“We had to do something in our downtime and I couldn’t spend the whole day experimenting on POWs, could I?”

“No, I guess not. So, which cartoons have you seen?” 

Knock Out scoffed. “First of all, they’re not  _ cartoons _ . It’s  _ anime _ . Second of all…”

_ Oh, boy. _ I had done it. I had unleashed Knock Out’s inner weeaboo. I folded my arms and leaned against the back of the seat, ready to ignore the worn-out speech I had suffered so many times both live and on the internet. Still, Knock Out! Of all people! Worse yet, what he had seen, he saw it before defecting to the Autobots. Bad guys were supposed to do only bad-guy stuff, not normal things. It was all so confusing. 

On the plus side, Knock Out’s speech lasted all the way to Tokyo, which helped me focus on remaining annoyed at him. That was a familiar feeling I most certainly preferred.

By the time we arrived to Tokyo, Knock Out was talking about how humans channeled their robo-envy through the mecha genre. 

“I understand you’d like to belong to a superior species, but in all honesty? Get some therapy.”

“If you say so,” I replied, stifling a yawn.

“Of course I say so, miss Apex Armor,” he said in a mocking tone that woke me up.

I pointed at the dashboard with my index finger. “That’s not what it was and you know it.”

“Do I? In any case, as a physician, I believe you’d benefit from talking about it with a professional.”

My only response to that was a frown, and from then on I began giving him instructions on how to get to Shibuya. I also placed my hands on his steering wheel.

“What are you doing? Hands off, Miko!”

“And get in trouble with the police this early in the evening? No thank you. I need to pretend I’m driving.”

“Ugh. Fine,” he conceded, and that’s how I got my little revenge.

We drove around for hours finding nothing of importance. Then again, finding a particular spec of white light in a city full of light bulbs of all sizes and colors would be extremely hard. I made sure of telling Knock Out that. 

“Don’t you have a tracker or a scanner or radar or anything?”

“As far as I know,” he began, “the need to track a single Spark hadn’t existed before today. Therefore, it pains me to say that we lack the technology. I can scan a certain area for Cybertronian lifeforms, and I’ve been trying to do that ever since I came out the spacebridge, just in case, but I get nothing except myself.”

“Which means your scanner only registers adults.”

“Following your inept analogy of the baby, yes, you can say that.”

I tapped my chin. “We need to narrow down where it could have gone.”

“Not to a merchandising store with the kind of money it had, that’s for sure.”

“Window shopping is a thing, you know,” I told him. But then I thought of something else. “Hey, do you know what cart—anime those two guys were watching?”

“Nope. Is it important?”

“It may be. Can you replay that part? And zoom on it as much as you can.”

He complied and soon we were trying to decipher what in the world was happening in that screen. It took us a while, but we made it. We reached the same conclusion at the same time.

“Oh! I know that one!” Knock Out said. 

“Me too. It’s one of my mom’s favorites.”

“But the plot doesn’t even happen on Earth, does it?”

“No. But it starts on Earth. The main characters reach that other land from the Tokyo Tower.” 

Then, I looked at his rear-view mirror, and it moved to focus more clearly on my face, and we both exclaimed at the same time, “Tokyo Tower!”

If there is a landmark anime fans know about, it’s that one. And that’s where we went next. 

“I expected it to be bigger,” Knock Out said as we drove in front of the tower.

“Now, we need to find a safe place for you to park so I can go up there looking for the Spark.”

“Which is, frankly, unfair,” Knock Out grunted. 

“That’s why you brought me,” I reminded him, “and how we’ve always done it.”

“Just because it makes sense doesn’t make it less unfair,” Knock Out whined as he parked his aft. Next, he opened his glove box to give me a glass cylinder with a strap that I could hang from my shoulder. “There. If you find it, try to convince it to get in there. Bring it back and I’ll take care of the rest.”

“Great. Leave it to me,” I said as I got out.

“And bring me a souvenir.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” I replied, already walking away.

I could go in length about this, the places I checked and the time it took me but, deferring to previously given instructions, I will cut to the chase and say that we were right and I found the fragging brat up in the tower, and when I say up, I do mean up.

The Spark was in neither of the observation decks, but outside and over it. It was difficult to see unless you knew what you were looking for. To be honest, I wasn’t sure of what I was looking for except for a ball of light moving autonomously. In any case, I had to convince it to come down, which was risky with all the people still on the tower. Or I could go out and get him inside the cylinder without anyone noticing. Which was more dangerous, but more practical—and more my style.

Finally able to use all that expensive training I got, I managed to sneak outside after causing a diversion that we may or may not call a small fire in the opposite corner. Making sure to put the cylinder on my back, I hurried up to climb on a metallic structure 300 meters above the ground and wind threatening to throw me down. Not a biggie. I’ve done worse. 

At some point, the Spark noticed me and remained very still, as if wanting to be confused with a light bulb. 

“So that’s how you’ve been surviving,” I murmured. I found a beam big enough to support my feet and then, still holding on with one hand, I raised my voice enough to be heard above the wind. “Hey! I know who you are! I’m here to take you back to Cybertron!”

The Spark seemed to startle, and it moved from one side to the other a couple of times before coming down, closer to my head. Although not close enough for me to grab it. Not that I would’ve tried. I didn’t even know if the Spark was tangible enough for me to do it. 

I reach for the cylinder with my free hand and pressed the button next to the lid to open it. “Get in here! You’ll be safe!”

The Spark moved backward and upward, slowly at first but increasing speed.

I tried to reason with it. Despite what  _ some  _ people think, I can use my words to be persuasive. “Listen, anime is not real.” Yes, I even called it anime and all. “You won’t be able to get to another world up here unless someone opens a spacebridge, and then you’ll be back on Cybertron anyway. Besides, wouldn’t it be better if you wait until you… grow? Or get a body? Or whatever it is that you do? Then you’ll be bigger and stronger and able to transform and we can hang out properly! What do you say?”

The Spark remained floating in its place for a few moments and then began to descend slowly. Reluctantly. Like a scolded child, a feeling that I understood quite well. 

I reached out, extending my arm with the cylinder, but in doing that I lost my balance. I did my best to regain it, to put my feet back on the beam. I failed, and instead of that, I slipped and fell down backward. I saw the Spark following me, but there was nothing it could do, could it? Lacking a physical body big enough to grab me and take me down without cracking my skull open on the asphalt.

But do you know who could? Slagging Knock Out. He had gone up the tower like a very red, very metallic, and less furry King Kong to catch me mid fall. I landed on his palm, heart racing and breathing fast, but with my skull intact. 

“There, there,” Knock Out said. “I got you.”

“I’m okay,” I said, shaking my head and laughing. I hadn’t had that kind of adrenaline rush in a while.

Knock Out rolled his eyes and muttered, “Wreckers,” which, and it hurts to admit, made me happy. 

The Spark reached us and circled my head two or three times before going inside the cylinder without further problem. I closed it and put the strap back on my shoulder.

“Well, that was easy,” I said.

Knock Out began to climb down. “I think it was apologizing.”

I patted the cylinder. “It’s all right. We survived and everything’s fine, isn't it?”

Knock Out chuckled. “Ah! I know now! And without the need of an online test. You are a tsundere!”

“Am not!” I replied, folding my arms.

However, we had bigger problems than arguing about cartoon stereotypes. All the people from the observation decks and the ground were busy gaping and taking photos and video of us.

“Uh, oh,” Knock Out said, very close to the ground now. “What do you say if I jump down the rest of the way, land as a car, and speed of into the distance?”

“There are too many people down there!”

“So?”

I was about to say what a terrible idea would be for him to give in to his yandere instincts, but I got an idea.

“Go down normally and let me on the ground. I know what to say. Just trust me.”

He pouted for a moment. “Fine,” he said in the end. “You’re our resident human.”

Once he did as I instructed, I raised my arms and made sure that most, if not all, the phones were directed at me. “Hello, everyone!” I said, trying to be all cute and upbeat. “You just saw our rehearsal for the next big summer blockbuster ‘The Transformers’! You’ll find out more about the story as trailers come out online! So, please, keep an eye out!” I even winked. You can’t say I don’t commit to the cause.

The crowd clapped and cheered.

“Let’s go before they start asking questions,” I told Knock Out.

“Good idea,” he replied and turned himself into a car, which made our audience go wild.

I forced myself to smile and wave to them before getting into the car, making sure the cylinder with the Spark was in one piece. Everything was in order, so we left without having to run over anyone. 

“Nice quick thinking out there,” Knock Out said.

“I know. I can be very creative.”

“Are we really filming that movie? I think it would be a good idea as long as you get my good angle every time.”

“I don’t see why not,” I replied. Even now I continue to think it's a tempting idea.

“We’re going to need a good script, though,” Knock Out said.

“So you make it all about yourself? I don’t think so.”

“I wasn’t going to!” he lied. “But we’ll need something interesting to focus on.”

We kept arguing about it all the way back to my bicycle. When we arrived there, we had a good idea for a first draft and had decided to keep developing it as a team.

“Are you sure you’re going to be fine with that thing this late?” he asked when I got my bike from under the leaves. “You can put that in the trunk and I can drive you back and call the spacebridge from there.”

“You sure?” I asked right back. I knew I would be safe, but I wasn’t going to say no to a ride.

“Least I can do,” he insisted, opening the door again.

I jumped right back in. “Okay!”

And that’s how it happened. Knock Out took me to my mom’s friend’s house, and called for the spacebridge two streets away, where it was quieter. He went back to Cybertron with a Spark that had hopefully learned its lesson, and I was left thinking that maybe,  **maybe** , he wasn’t that bad after all.

**Author's Note:**

> I began it for the Unexpected Friendship prompt of [](https://trope-bingo.dreamwidth.org/profile)[](https://trope-bingo.dreamwidth.org/)**trope_bingo** , but by the time I finished it, it didn't even qualify timewise LOL.


End file.
